I’m always surprised at what people throw away. I often pull discarded prints out of the waste paper bin at the workshop, they’re done on beautiful paper with top quality inks and can be reused for drawings and collage but still people chuck them. Other people’s waste is my raw material and I use these thrown away prints for my own drawings. I like starting to draw over something unfamiliar. I took this down to the beach last night and drew with compressed charcoal, used neat and also rubbed in with my fingers. I might eventually cut it down to a small border or even no border at all. I was standing outside the Civic Centre, looking across Swansea Bay at Mumbles.

I’m currently working on a series of expressive drawings of ancestral sites and if you want to see some of my other artworks, please click here.

The Three Rs – Recycle, Repurpose, Reuse; it’s what I do with paper all the time. If something doesn’t work out, no point in keeping it hanging around. And as I use really good quality paper, I’m not going to bin it. I did a massive drawing on Fabriano Accademica about a year ago (you can see my fingers at the top), using my home-made walnut ink. I never liked the drawing so it’s been rolled up in a cupboard but I liked what I did last week when I was out and about drawing ancestral stones in West Wales. I drew over a similar walnut ink drawing (here) and decided to do some more when I go out again this weekend.

I chopped the big drawing into 14 smaller pieces that will fit onto my portable drawing board. Some of them looked great as they are but I decided to work into a few with some more walnut ink. I hadn’t used it since last summer; the original ink was fine but the two bottles of wash that I’d thinned out with some water both had a thin layer of mould on top. I scraped it off and it didn’t smell bad so I used it. The ink is thick and silky. It flows beautifully off the brush and leaves lovely, slightly shiny brush marks across the paper. I’m ready for two or three more drawing trips now, following the mythological trail of the Boar Hunt, Y Twrch Trwyth, from the Mabinogion, the book of ancient Welsh legends.

I’m travelling around with archaeologist Dewi Bowen who is researching his new book. His previous book on the standing stones of Ancient Siluria (South East Wales) can be found here. Accompanying us is film maker Melvyn Williams who is recording a documentary about the process. Some of Melvyn’s short films can be seen here. If you want to see some galleries of my artworks, please click here.